


Patience is the virtue of asses

by beanarie



Category: Elementary (TV)
Genre: Gen, Minor Canonical Character(s), Minor Injuries, meaningful connections
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-24
Updated: 2013-06-24
Packaged: 2017-12-16 01:30:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 920
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/856239
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beanarie/pseuds/beanarie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"You've retired," Sherlock announces, and Joan should probably be more surprised that he literally deduced that with his eyes closed.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Patience is the virtue of asses

With one arm held tight across her midsection, Joan uses just her thumb and forefinger to flip very carefully past articles about kids on Ritalin, how to make restaurant-worthy risotto in the microwave, and over two dozen unknown uses for crepe paper. Neither of them, the parenting magazine or the attempt to keep her body still, are doing much to take her mind off the pain. A nurse calls over a man holding a dish towel to a bloody head laceration and takes him through the double doors. _Lucky bastard,_ Joan can't help thinking. Next to her, Sherlock stirs, raising his head from the wall.

"We have passed noon by this point, have we not?" 

Her first instinct is to check her watch, but a glance at her bare wrist reminds her that it's most likely sitting next to her phone on the bench in the foyer. There aren't any clocks on the walls, either, only a flatscreen TV playing an endless loop of health-related PSAs. Check your blood sugar regularly. Know your family history. Get a mammogram every one to two years after age forty. Joan sighs. "No idea," she says as the woman on the screen soapboxes about the proper bedding for infants, feeling like she's being punished for something, but hell if she can figure out what. 

Sherlock's groan is loud enough to elicit a glare from the old lady with the hyperactive grandchild across from them. "Wait is interminable," he mutters. His right hand is still clamped over the compress covering his right eye and he doesn't bother opening his left. The grumbling has been kept to a minimum until now, curiously. Joan suspects a mild concussion on top of the obvious injury.

"Sherlock, is that you?"

Sherlock stiffens. Joan does a very gradual quarter turn in her seat. Edson, the groundskeeper from Hemdale, is standing there, looking comfortable and grandfatherly in worn jeans and a plaid flannel shirt.

"Miss Watson?" Edson tilts his head, puzzling over not just their presence in the ER, but that Joan is still by Sherlock's side all these months later. "What in the world happened to you two?"

"You've retired," Sherlock announces, and Joan should probably be more surprised that he literally deduced that with his eyes closed. 

Edson lets out a good-natured laugh. "Didn't have much choice after the double knee replacement. Would've been nice to be able to keep my house a little while longer, but what can you do?"

Sherlock opens his eye, straightening up in his seat. "So back to Georgia then."

"Next month." Edson nods, smiling. "I was just breaking the news to my daughter over lunch. She's back there now." He jerks his head toward the double doors Joan has been trying not to fixate on for the past several hours. "Doing her ER rotation. Stole her away for as long as I could, a whole twenty minutes."

It's always interesting watching Sherlock interact with someone he knew before Joan. There's an element of mystery, as she's forced to pick apart what he knows from deductions and what he learned the way normal people would, through the natural give and take of personal interaction. Sometimes she's able to tell by the other person's reactions, but a few have been too accustomed to how Sherlock operates to be caught off-guard by his random observations.

"So that's where I'm at," Edson says. "Now, forgive me for saying so, but I was hoping if I ever saw you again you'd be looking a little better than this. You get hurt on one of your investigations?"

"We did not," Sherlock says, his clipped words forcing out of Joan a tiny, tiny bit of a laugh that she regrets immediately. 

She'd like to say they learned something this morning. Sherlock will hopefully never again walk while peering into his microscope. As for Joan, well, with bruised ribs and a possibly broken collarbone, it'll be a long time before she's able to ride a bike, much less walk it into the apartment. They won't be duplicating the circumstances that led them here, she doesn't think, though the chance of collisions would go down considerably if she put a bell on him. He might agree to it, too, if it were just in the house.

"You know what? Why don't I go back there and see if my Deborah can tell me how much longer you two have to wait?"

A man on the TV starts in about prostate exams, and there goes Joan's ability to even _try_ to play it cool. "Oh my God, that would be amazing. We've been here since breakfast-time... possibly yesterday. I can't even tell anymore."

Sherlock's fingers tap out the William Tell Overture on his knee. "Uh, Edson."

Edson retraces the step he took toward the reception window. "You all right?"

Sherlock mumbles something about how Edson might want to stop by the brownstone before he leaves New York, check out the hive Sherlock has been maintaining completely on his own without a shred of assistance (Joan rolls her eyes), but it's perfectly understandable if he doesn't have the time or the inclination, of course this is a busy time for him right now and, actually, never mind.

"I'd like that," Edson says with a grin. "But we'll have to get you out of here first. Just sit tight. I'll be back in a minute with some answers."

Joan tells herself she is not allowed to smile. She really isn't.

Sherlock vindictively snatches her magazine.

**Author's Note:**

> My contribution to the [Elementary Elemental Challenge](http://forensiphile.tumblr.com/post/53524358815/elementary-elemental-challenge). hophophop assigned me the following elements: Edson, microscope, bicycle, breakfast, not knowing what time it is. Of course I used that as an excuse to hurt Sherlock and Joan. I've accepted that that is all I do with any prompt I am given. 
> 
> The title is a French proverb.


End file.
